Uploaded October 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
What happened before the big bang? Most cosmologists agree we need a quantum theory of gravity to answer this question. You may have heard of string theory or loop quantum gravity, but in the 1970s, Nobel Prize Winner Steven Weinberg created another theory of quantum gravity: Asymptotic Safety. Recently, it has been revived, especially as it seemed to precisely predict the mass of the Higgs Boson. In this film, we talk to some of the leading researchers in the field to understand this theory and what it might say about the universe's origins.
00:00 Introduction
01:00 Fractal Universe
2:12 Asymptotic safety
5:03 Predicting the value of the constants
9:07 Supersymmetry
10:37 History of ASG
13:10 Answering the critics
14:51 Black holes
16:10 Big Bang
19:46 What happened before the Big Bang?
21:14 Did the universe have a beginning?
24:44 Scale invariance
What happened before the big bang? Most cosmologists agree we need a quantum theory of gravity to answer this question. You may have heard of string theory or loop quantum gravity, but in the 1970s, Nobel Prize Winner Steven Weinberg created another theory of quantum gravity: Asymptotic Safety. Recently, it has been revived, especially as it seemed to precisely predict the mass of the Higgs Boson. In this film, we talk to some of the leading researchers in the field to understand this theory and what it might say about the universe's origins.
00:00 Introduction
01:00 Fractal Universe
2:12 Asymptotic safety
5:03 Predicting the value of the constants
9:07 Supersymmetry
10:37 History of ASG
13:10 Answering the critics
14:51 Black holes
16:10 Big Bang
19:46 What happened before the Big Bang?
21:14 Did the universe have a beginning?
24:44 Scale invariance
